LITMIR.BIZ

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lunch in a brown paper bag. When kids come to school and they have their lunch in a brown paper bag, everyone knows that someone cares about them.”

      Two months later, Maurice had no one to go with him to his parent-teacher conference, and Laura stepped in again. In her book, she shares the conversation she had with Maurice’s teacher.

      “You should know that Maurice is very proud of you,” the teacher said. “He speaks about you often.”

      “I’m very proud of him,” Laura said. “He’s such a special boy.”

      “Miss Schroff, I must say something to you. Children like Maurice are always disappointed in life. Every day someone else lets them down. I hope you realize you can’t just come in and out of his life. If you are going to be there for him, you have to really be there for him. You cannot just wake up one day and abandon this boy.”

      “Maurice is my friend, and I would never walk out on a friend.”

      As Laura and Maurice became closer, Maurice began spending time with Laura’s family, and it was a visit with Laura’s sister, Annette, on Christmas Day that inspired him to start thinking about his future. He was amazed by what he saw—in their home in a New York suburb, Annette’s family had three bathrooms all to themselves, their own washer and dryer and a room just for watching TV. Even more amazing, the whole family sat down for dinner together. At Maurice’s house, no one sat down to eat, let alone together. He’d eat wherever he was when he was handed food. This was a revelation for him.

      On the way home that night, Laura asked him what his favorite part of the day had been, thinking he’d say it was riding bikes or playing on the backyard swing set with Annette’s kids.

      “I love that room,” he said.

      “Which room?”

      “You know, that fancy room where we had dinner.”

      “Oh, that’s the dining room. Why did you love that room?”

      “I thought the food was great, but I loved how everybody was talking and laughing and sharing. And, you know what? Someday when I grow up, I’m going to have a room just like that.”

      After having received only two gifts in his life—a teddy bear from the Salvation Army and a joint from his grandmother—Maurice had received many gifts that night. And the most important one was the inspiration to dream.

      “At that point, I’d never looked that far down the road,” Maurice says in An Invisible Thread. “I just lived from day to day. I was more worried about what I was going to eat the next day than about what I wanted to be when I grew up. I didn’t know if I even would grow up, given the way I was living, but after meeting Laura, I began to broaden my view on my life. I began to think I could actually get a job of some kind. For the first time ever, I could picture myself as an adult, and maybe even see myself working.”

      Maurice went on to get a high school GED and graduate from college. He’s now in the construction business, and he and his wife of over twenty years have seven children. He also mentors kids in community youth groups.

      It all could have gone very differently if Laura had simply given him a few dollars to get something to eat. “To this day I can still feel the pain of my stomach hurting from not eating for two days. And God sent me an angel. And my angel was my mom Laura. I love her to death.”

      The relationship has changed Laura’s life, too. “I was so lucky to meet him. I was thirty-five years old and working around the clock, and all of a sudden one day this kid came into my life and gave me this incredible different perspective and purpose in my life. Maurice opened my eyes and heart to so many things. He taught me one of the greatest lessons a person can hope to learn: He taught me to be grateful for what I have. If we could all walk in Maurice’s shoes for just one day, we’d never complain about our lives again. He taught me about resilience and courage. He taught me the real meaning of lunch in a brown paper bag.”

      He also taught her the importance of having a big dining room table where a family eats together and shares conversation—like the one where Maurice and his family eat today.

       EVERYTHING I NEED TO KNOW I LEARNED IN MY FIRST SEMESTER OF COLLEGE

      Institutions have a unique opportunity because they tend to reach so many people, whether through consistent kindness or a single action that has an impact decades later. The example that Haverford College set for Howard Lutnick would reverberate eighteen years after he graduated.

      When terrorists flew hijacked planes into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Howard and his wife were dropping their son off for his first day of kindergarten in the Bronx. After hearing what had happened, Howard, raced to the scene to check on his employees at the financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald, where he was president. The firm’s Lower Manhattan office employed 960 people at One World Trade Center.

      When he arrived, he approached people rushing out of the building, but he could find none of the 658 employees who had been in the office that day. Before long, he found himself consumed in a cloud of debris as Two World Trade Center collapsed, and he had to flee the scene.

      Howard later learned that none of the employees had survived. The plane had crashed into the ninety-third floor, and Cantor Fitzgerald’s offices were above the point of impact. His employees had no way to escape.

      Making the situation especially heartbreaking was Cantor’s policy of encouraging employees to hire friends and family—the company believes hires should be people the team would love to work with. So the survivors lost not just colleagues but friends and family. That held true for everyone from the CEO to the security guard: Howard lost his brother, security guard James Hopper lost his brother-in-law and both lost their best friends. Some siblings died together—twenty-seven sets in all. The loss could barely be comprehended.

      In the wake of the tragedy, with no way to contact the employees who hadn’t been in the office, the company asked media sources to announce the details of a conference call they could join. That call turned out to be pivotal.

      “What I said was, ‘If we are going to go back to work, it sure as heck isn’t for money,’ ” Howard says. “ ‘Because Lord knows I really couldn’t care less about going to work and I couldn’t care less about money. What I want to do is crawl into bed in a ball and just hold my family as tight as I possibly can. But if we are going to go to work, there is only one reason we are going to work, and that is we have to help the families of those we lost.’ We ended up with a unanimous decision by all those who were on the phone that we were going to rebuild the company and try to have the company survive for one reason and one reason only: to try to help the families of those we lost.”

      After being abandoned by his own family as a college student, he knew exactly what not to do in this situation.

      “My mother died when I was in eleventh grade, and Dad was killed my first week at Haverford College. My extended family pulled out. We were three children—my twenty-year-old sister, eighteen-year-old me and my fifteen-year-old brother—and they thought we’d be sticky. My uncle thought that if he reached in and he touched us and we came over for dinner, maybe we’d never leave. So they chose not to ever invite us for dinner, and I knew what it was like when people pulled out.”

      The administrators at Haverford, who had known Howard for only a week when he lost his father, set a different example. The president of the college called Howard immediately to tell him the college would pay for his education. The university his sister attended, on the other hand, told her that she should get a job as a waitress if she couldn’t afford tuition—making Haverford’s offer even more meaningful.

      “Haverford College showed me what it meant to be a human being,” Howard says, and he went on to demonstrate the same humanity in the wake of the 9/11 tragedy. Besides committing to being present for the families of his deceased employees and helping them financially, he personally called them and wrote thirteen hundred condolence notes by hand, to both spouses and parents. He also set up a foundation run by his sister to provide information, support and

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